We've got more fumblings and foibles from the game industry this week, as people manage to delete some games and leak others. We've also got some sales news that should make several game companies very happy.

Um. Oops.

I'd hate to be the person responsible for this one. A small Japanese MMO called M2 was shut down recently after the game was accidentally deleted during maintenance. That's right, somebody accidentally deleted an entire game. There appears to have been no usable backup available for whatever crucial code was nuked, leaving the company no choice but to declare M2 dead and buried. M2 was largely supported by microtransactions, so there are probably some angry people out there who are looking for a way to get their money back.

Watch Out for Spoilers

Thanks to a flub at Microsoft, which accidentally let Mass Effect 3 beta code slip into a dashboard upgrade, details of ME3's story have been leaked all over the Internet. This highly-anticipated conclusion to Commander Shepard's saga won't be out until next year, but some overeager fans can't help but peek at the game's innards ahead of time.

I personally haven't been tempted to peek at spoilers since the long-ago year that I found my mom's Christmas present stash and realized that it's not as much fun without the surprise, but enough people have done so that BioWare is speaking out about the issue. BioWare boss Ray Muzyka has stated that the story is still in a relatively early form, and there will be plenty of changes before the game comes out. He even acknowledges that his team is reading feedback from fans who have read the pre-release script and considering that feedback when making changes. Still, he urges people to refrain from reading the spoilers, because the game just won't be as much fun that way.

October's Battlefield: Batman

October's North American retail sales numbers are out, seeing Battlefield 3 at the top of the sales chart with Batman: Arkham City right behind it. Rage rang in at number four despite a rocky launch, and Forza Motorsport came in eighth. Interestingly, From Software's tough-as-nails action RPG Dark Souls was the sixth top-seller. Who says modern gamers don't want a challenge?

The Xbox 360 is still leading hardware sales with almost 400,000 units sold. The Wii and 3DS came in next with 250,000 each. The 3DS is now poised to beat out the first-year sales of the original DS, which should be hopeful news for Nintendo.

Despite software sales being up three percent from last year, industry analysts report being disappointed. They'd predicted a much higher increase of twelve to fourteen percent. Perhaps somebody ought to tell these folks that there's still a bit of a recession going on here?

Draconic Warfare Domination

To absolutely nobody's surprise, Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have dominated sales and discussion over the past two weeks. MW3 sold over $775 million in its first five days, breaking the record previously set by Call of Duty: Black Ops. It also set a record for concurrent players on Xbox Live at 3.3 million.

Although it didn't touch MW3's lofty numbers, Skyrim also did quite well at launch, selling over 3.5 million copies in the first two days. On Steam, Skyrim players far outnumbered Modern Warfare 3 players, recently seeing peaks of over 200,000 players at once. It will be interesting to see which of the two games has more legs: the shooter with a multiplayer mode that many people will play for a long time, or the massive, moddable RPG?

By Becky CunninghamCCC
Contributing Writer

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*